Moral right takes us back to dark ages of sexuality

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Hypocritical puritans hounded a leading US sex researcher to the
grave. Now, writes John Patterson, they're after his movie.

Bill Condon's biopic Kinsey would be an important movie
at any time, but right now, with the "moral values" crowd in the
ascendant and thirsty for the blood of heretics in the aftermath of
George Bush's re-election, it's an absolutely essential movie.

Dr Alfred Kinsey, played by Liam Neeson, was the Harvard-trained
entomologist who pioneered research into the sexual habits of
Americans. After interviewing tens of thousands of men and women,
he collected his findings in two books that changed the way
Americans comprehended sex.

Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male, published in 1948,
and its female counterpart (1953), revealed the bedroom (and locker
room and barnyard) habits of Americans in a way that blew the lid
off puritanism forever. "God, what a gap between social front and
reality!" was the conclusion he came to. Kinsey's been dead for
nearly half a century and now, thanks to the movie, the religious
right want to dig him up and kill him all over again.

Working at the University of Indiana - about as "red" as you
could hope to find nowadays, and sponsored by that well-known
fifth-column, the Rockefeller Foundation - Kinsey and his team
developed as precise an interview formula as was possible in a
country still mired in sexual ignorance and fear.

He interviewed single and married straights, gays, lesbians,
incarcerated rapists and sex criminals, even those who had sought
congress with beasts of the field and farmyard, all without
surrendering scientific objectivity or passing moral
judgements.

Before he published his work, Americans assumed that sex
occurred only after marriage, that homosexuals and lesbians were
demonic inverts, and that masturbation led to godless communism,
hairy-handedness and imbecilised high-school quarterbacks drooling
on college jackets.

Kinsey's two books were bestsellers, but he became entangled in
the neuroses of his time. The Rockefeller folk were hounded into
dropping their support, and J. Edgar Hoover demanded - but didn't
receive - Kinsey's assistance in witch-hunting gays at the US State
Department. That Hoover was a cross-dressing, closeted homosexual
who lived with his overpromoted pretty-boy assistant, FBI director
Clyde Tolson, speaks volumes about the grotesque hypocrisy of
public figures in those days. Kinsey's detractors lined up around
the block to get their licks in, then as now, and it's possible
that their efforts helped speed his early demise in 1956 aged
62.

Condon's movie does a splendid job of recreating the
quasi-Victorian sexual politics of a time when people scarcely knew
what to do or feel about their ungovernable sex drives. The film
shows interview subjects startled to learn that babies do not
emerge from the female bellybutton or that there's more than one
position for coitus.

Kinsey is one of the inventors of our modern sex lives. He
stands with Margaret Sanger, who agitated for birth control and
backed research that gave us the pill by 1960 - which in turn gave
us the unzipped sexual revolution and the bra-burning women's
movement - and with Hugh Hefner, who 'fessed up and said flat out
that, yup, he was hornier than a dog with two dicks and didn't care
who knew it. If you've ever had a guilt-and-fear-free orgasm, you
owe them all big time.

And because of that, the religious right still fear and despise
Kinsey and his works. Check out some of the responses to the movie.
"Kinsey's proper place is with the Nazi doctor Josef Mengele," says
Robert Knight of Concerned Women for America, inadvertently showing
us what he thinks of the Holocaust. Robert Peters of Morality in
Media: "That's part of Kinsey's legacy: AIDS, abortion, the high
divorce rate, pornography."

Focus on the Family's film critic, Tom Neven, calls the movie
"rank propaganda for the sexual revolution and the homosexual
agenda". And Judith Reisman, who has waged a long war against
Kinsey's memory, refers to "a legacy of massive venereal disease,
broken hearts and broken souls". These people are of a piece with
new Republican congressmen who have sex on the brain, such as Tom
Coburn of Oklahoma, who thinks there is an epidemic of lesbianism
in Oklahoma schools, and South Carolina's Jim DeMint who wants gays
and pregnant single mothers barred from teaching decent,
God-fearing folk.

At the dawn of a digitised, globalised millennium, these creeps
want the clocks turned back to when the church held sway over our
sexuality. They prefer us ignorant and terrified, alone in the
dark, the better for them to control us through fear and guilt. Too
bad for them that we live in the bright, vivid light of our
incandescent dirty dreams.